Happening in Antarctica : Antarctic Glaciology Fails IPCC

Despite all the inadequacies of the IPCC report on global climate change, they concede one major fact about Antarctica : Very poorly understood glacial dynamics for West Antarctica. There is a new report on this in the recent issue of Science (Jan 18).

H Jesse Smith in his Science article (Science, V319, N5861, p. 259) entitled "Whither Antarctic Ice", examines the mass balance of Antarctica as a mean to deduce global climate trends. Broadly, it is understood from gross observation that the interior of E. Antartica remains cold, and at the periphery in W. Antarctica and the peninsula, there has been a warming. Mass balance in W. Antartica, however, depends on knowledge of the dynamics of W. Antartic Ice Streams. The IPCC report would not consider existing knowledge reliable or well-understood. That is a surprise, since it has made many far-reaching conclusions on other topics, based on many questionable hypotheses.
Why the caution here then?

Could it be that an intense NSF study of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (including the Ross Ice Shelf and the Siple Coast) concluded that West Antartica was stable, and was unchanging for the last 50 years, and likely to remain so for 400 years if not 1 million years, and then everyone watched as West Antartica proceeded to melt and large ice shelves to calf?

In one major study broad conclusions for the ice stream region were based on a single point measurement. It is not that this is all the data there is, but rather that there has been intentional misrepresentation in this situation, and no one to correct it. Also investigators seldom go the field themselves and leave it up to students to carry out the programs unsupervised. This, and no cross-checking, and one can only imagine the importance of NSF's results. One student involved in these studies, now a researcher and contributor to the IPCC report, claimed to have done considerable ice core studies, and had in fact, never looked at more than a few ice slides made from a microtome. He now leads an ice core lab.

I guess we will just have to wait until these guys retire, and then hope they are not replaced with their graduate students, right? Perhaps the Inspector General will pick up on them, and the justice department will continue its aggressive prosecutions. Its a good thing the system works, because of the human impact on the climate and its immediacy.